Aggressive Tenderness

Totus Tuus

            This January saw another March for Life in Washington D.C. marking the 41^st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade court decision, legalizing abortion in the US.  Every year Catholics from all over the country gather at the nation’s capitol to try and bear witness to the sanctity of life.  Our witness, however, needs to be more then a one-day affair; it needs to be our very lives.  We must wage a war of love for life. 

            The war for life will not be won through polls, political candidates, or violence; it will be won on the battleground of individual hearts, one person at a time.  Politicians cannot give value to life or take it away; one must come to see its value as self-evident.  As Catholics our passion for life must go beyond just a political policy, it must be rooted in the Person of Jesus Christ.  How are we to fight this war for life?  By living a life of faith, convicted of the fact that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God.  If we are to love those who are yet to be born, we must also love all those we encounter everyday with the love of Christ.  We must be the light of the world to the rest of the world showing what true Christian charity looks like by the witness of our lives.  Pope Francis is calling for the Church to live out the aggressive tenderness of Jesus.  We must be disciples who possess the joy of knowing Jesus and following Him everyday.  This is not a mandate for popes, bishops, priests, monks, or nuns; it is our privilege as baptized Christians.  We must be a people living with the aggressive tenderness of Christ.

            The reason abortion always stirs up such a strong reaction is because it causes so much pain.   Why do people get upset at the Church?  Its not like priests are going to show up at somebody’s house and arrest them because they had an abortion.  No, definitely not.  The Church is that last voice of conscience in the world, refusing to bend or just shut up.  I think of a Band-Aid over a nasty cut that is pulled off whenever someone who has been affected by abortion is reminded of it.  It’s painful.  We cannot bend on our stance for life so we must be a people of God’s aggressive tenderness, embracing that pain.  People do not choose abortion seeing the evil that it is; they have been lied to.  People think abortion will bring about healing and help them to get on with their lives, whatever their circumstances may be, but all it does is cause pain, terrible pain.  They choose what politicians and businessmen dress up as a neat solution to what they call the problem of pregnancy.  We cannot view the beautiful gift of a woman’s fertility as a disease that needs to be cured through contraception and abortion; a woman’s dignity is so much greater than that.  In our world that’s hurting so much, the only healing will come through Christ’s aggressive tenderness. 

“Christ’s triumph is always a cross, yet a cross, which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil.”

-Pope Francis, “The Joy of the Gospel”

Here's my November article for Fe Fuerza Vida...

Totus Tuus

It’s our natural reaction to give thanks for the good present in our lives…I mean unless you’re some kind of jerk.  Seriously though, being thankful is a key part of human happiness.  Gratitude is the recognition of our dependence on God and the humility to admit it.  In this country we have so much we take for granted that other people around the world literally die because they lack.  America’s poverty is not a material poverty, but a spiritual poverty.  As Mother Teresa once said, “In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love.  There is no greater sickness in the world than that one.” 

This poverty of spirit starts in the home.  If everyone were to take care of his or her own family this world would be a beautiful place.  Unfortunately that’s not the case and we just have deal with whatever situation we are born into.  If our families are in overall good shape, we give thanks.  If they are not, we give thanks for what we have and avoid playing the role of a victim.  We must not let our hurt hold us down; rather we should wear it as a badge of courage for what we have survived and know that God loves us in our brokenness. 

There is a dual aspect to thanksgiving.  In the act of being thankful we see all the good present in our lives and the misery present in the lives of others.  We can’t be good Christians unless we are mindful of both.  Thanksgiving is not only a reminder of the good in our lives, but also a call to action.  Jesus calls us to hold those who are down and out close to our hearts.  He wants to work through us for them.  Jesus associates himself so much with the poor and miserable that he says, “What you have done to the least of my brothers, you have done to me.”  If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will.  It scares me everyday.

What can we do then?  What concrete steps can we take?  It can be as simple as buying a homeless man a slice of pizza the next time he asks for money on the street instead of just throwing a dollar at him or trying to not look him in the eye.  It can be as simple as going out of your way to somebody at school you really don’t know who lost a loved one or just somebody at school who is a little “weird”.  Maybe God wants you to do more then this still.  In order to listen we must first get out of ourselves instead of living behind the walls we put up to keep the misery around us out.   

Lions, and tigers, and axe-murders...oh my

Here's my article for this month's issue of Fe Fuerza Vida.

I must confess that I’m not the biggest fan of horror movies and I never was.  Many of my friends have always been fanatics, but it just never appealed to me.  They tend to all seem so cliché and I feel that most of them share the same plot.  There’s an inescapable situation, maniacal murder(s), inevitable sex scene that has nothing to do with the plot, blood, gore, and an ending that is confusing and doesn’t really conclude anything.

I think the last horror movie I saw was “The Purge”, if you didn’t see it, don’t, you didn’t miss much.  The context of the movie is that for one 12-hour period every year, emergency services and law are suspended and people run wild taking revenge or just killing for the sake of killing.  The reason in the movie for this purge was the idea that since people are “violent and evil” by nature (which we’re not), these 12-hours serve as a healthy release for tension allowing for society to flourish for the other 364 days out of the year in a crime free country.  Whatever.

This idea of killing out of boredom as seen in “The Purge” may seem to exist only in Hollywood, at least I thought so, but I was disturbed when I heard a story on the news in late August.  Three black teenagers shot an Australian man who was just jogging on the side of the road in Oklahoma.  Do you remember this?  Look it up.  When one of the teenagers was asked why they shot the man, he responded, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”  I can’t help thinking that movies, TV and video games, which equate the destruction of human life to entertainment, do not in some way contribute to the all too common tragic shootings we see in this country today.  I think not only of this incident in Oklahoma, but especially the Newtown school shooting and the shooting in the movie theater last year in Colorado.

We have to realize as a society that what we feed our minds does affect us, even if only sub-consciously.  Entertainment should try to elevate man’s mind, not bring it down.  We should always try to fill our minds with what is good, true and beautiful.  That is what we are meant for and it is only there that we will find happiness and cultivate a culture of life.

Kudos to the guy who did this...

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Check out the video: http://www.wsmv.com/story/23595032/billboard-sparks-

Courtesy of: http://www.wsmv.com/story/23595032/billboard-sparks-conversation-above-nashville-adult-store

Hands

After a long, dormant slumber, I thought I might revive my old blog and share some things I have written.  Why not, right?  I've been asked to write for the past some odd months in a Spanish Catholic newspaper on Long Island (its a long story, but no its not in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish that well) so I thought of maybe sharing some of things I write for them here as well.  Kill two birds with one stone, you know?

Anyways, this is something I wrote back around the springtime to submit to an elderly priest who was trying to put a book together.  The book was supposed to consist of reflections given by seminarians on the priesthood, but it seems it may have been a project that never got off the ground.  Anyways he liked it so I hope you do too.  

 The priesthood is both enticing and overwhelming.  Sometimes I stop in certain moments and think about my hands.  I think about what they have done, both good and bad.  I think about the work I have used them for.  I think about the hands of people I have met throughout my whole life, people I have long known and those whom I have only met in passing.  Then I think about the hands of the priest, whose hands lift up broken humanity to God with the very hands of Jesus.  The same hands that lift Jesus in the Eucharist to the Father in the Mass.  The same hands that absolve and reconcile all things to Him.  I think of hands that help, hands that heal, hands meant for all God’s people. 

Peace and good,

Mike

He did not say...